


Products of Joy

by Ferith12



Series: Love, Joy, Hope [1]
Category: DCU
Genre: Dick Grayson is a Talon, Gen, Jason Todd is a Talon, Probably will not be continued, sort of, talon au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-20
Updated: 2016-03-20
Packaged: 2018-05-27 23:33:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6304567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ferith12/pseuds/Ferith12
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>...That title makes this sound like a happy story, doesn't it?</p><p>Spoiler: it's not a happy story.  Not all THAT sad, either I don't think, but definitely not all happy.</p><p>This story is set in a world that is very, very much like my Shining Brokenness universe.  Dick Grayson was taken by the court of Owls to become their newest Talon.  He is tortured and brainwashed until he can no longer feel emotions and is nothing more than a tool for the Court.  All that changes when a little boy called Jason stumbles into the Talons' lair fleeing the Batman.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Products of Joy

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this as the first chapter of a long story, before I realized I cannot plot. At all. So instead I wrote the Shining Brokenness universe, which is closer to cannon and therefore easier for me to just spend my time making onshots in. 
> 
> I still really like this (very, very unedited, sorry) chapter, so I decided to post it. If you want more in this universe, I might oblige. (or I might oblige simply because I feel like it, despite it being so much like Shining Brokenness that I sort of feel like I'm just copying myself.) But I won't complete this story as a chapter fic. I'm just really bad at anything longer than this.

He was perfect. He was the best talon that the court had ever had. He was like his great, great, great grandfather, only without his pathologic enjoyment of pain and twice his skill. He knew this. A very small part of him was loved this. A very small part of him was born to perform, born to please. But that part was mostly dead.  
Because he, the acrobat, the talon, was no longer able to love. He was no longer able to feel anything. They had broken him of that.  
It had taken them forever for them to do, and sometimes he thought that they hadn’t done it quite well enough. Sometimes, when he went out to kill someone, it almost hurt. Sometimes when he saw pain, he almost felt empathy. He knew he always felt sorrow, despair, anger, just a small bit of it. He wasn’t supposed to. They had had to break him more than any talon before, had to try to make him completely emotionless. They didn’t normally do this. All talons were expected to keep their emotions in check, of course, but they usually had some. Usually, after a few months of conditioning talons were left with only feelings of hatred and pain, or anger, or simply emptiness and grief, unable to ever again feel joy or love or hope.  
That had not happened to the acrobat. Somehow, he simply refused to relinquish his love and joy and hope. They kept him in conditioning for over a year, a year that was lost to him, for the most part. Most of his memories were lost, even the ones from after he became a talon, because with his emotions almost eradicated, and every moment a living horror, and without any goals and without anything really happening, there was little point in remembering. He knew that the court had had to try new techniques on him, tortures they had never devised before. At the end of it he had been completely insane.  
He was still a little insane. He imagined things sometimes, things that weren’t there. They were like nightmares, only they happened when he was wide awake, and anyway, talons didn’t dream.  
Sometimes he saw people he had killed, usually the children. He never felt anything when he actually killed people, but when he was in the midst of the hallucinations he could feel. In some of them he felt a sense of amazing triumph and exhilaration, like he ENJOYED killing. He could hear a voice, that he was pretty sure was his, laughing. It was an echoing, crazy laugh that he was pretty sure would freak out anyone who heard it.  
Other times, his hallucination self saw the deaths and felt pain and fear and overwhelming guilt.  
He preferred the second kind.  
When he did not see the children he had killed, he saw a group of people he could not remember but felt he should, lying dead all around him. Two men, two women, and a boy a little older than the acrobat believed himself to be now. They seemed, also, while lying about him in crippled heaps, with blood pooling and running all about the concrete and the bones sticking out at odd angles through skin and the ripped cloth of their leotards, to be flying, free and strong and beautiful. He had a feeling that he should care about these people very, very much, that he missed them intensely, their broken bodies seemed to break him more than anything the court should do to him. Generally he looked at them and knew that their death was not his fault. He still felt guilt though. Isn’t that strange? He supposed it had something to do with love. Love was once incredibly important to him, he knew, but he no longer had any idea what it was. That hurt sometimes, but for the most part he was numb.  
Sometimes when he saw the familiar strangers lying dead around him, he felt as though his mind was split in two. Most of it gloated, and then it did feel as though he had killed them, he had poured acid on the wires before the show, no one had suspected the adorable little boy with bright, mischievous eyes who his parents loved and trusted unconditionally. He had clipped the birds wings and he was proud and triumphant. The laughter that was his could be heard everywhere around him. It echoed and went on and on, sometimes even after the hallucination had faded. But that wasn’t all. His whole mind never joined in this strange sort of … joy (it felt like he was breaking something sacred, somehow, when he used that word to refer to his feelings when he was dreaming like that), no part of his mind saw what happen and what the other part was feeling, and it was filled with horror, pure, concentrated, unfiltered horror that engulfed him and made it so that he could hardly breathe. Because it was all so wrong. HE was so wrong.  
The hallucinations were always vivid. He could never escape them. Sometimes they came often, sometimes he would go for months without an incident. He always knew the difference between the hallucinations and reality. When he had a hallucination he could feel. When he had a hallucination he was alive. He was glad that he was not alive. Living hurt.  
And yet, though it never hurt, though he was used to it by now, sometimes the acrobat hated his dead life, and would rather have the pain and ugliness of his over strong imagination. Because he knew that his deadness was wrong. Maybe not quite as wrong as the strange ecstatic feeling in some of them, the feeling that he believed his great grandfather felt whenever he tortured or killed, but even that seemed to fit him more than the emptiness.  
But it was only once in a while did he think like that. Most of the time he didn’t think at all. He simply wandered through the labyrinth of caves waiting for the court to summon him for a new mission. He was empty. He was a talon, a tool.  
There were other ways in which his insanity, the slight problems in his brain, would manifest themselves.  
He had a hard time knowing what was real and what wasn’t sometimes. It wasn’t just the grand hallucinations, there were other things too. Objects would sometimes look like things that they weren’t. He once took out a throwing knife and became sure that it was a mirror. That mistake had gotten him a stab wound, and his opponent ten seconds more terror than was necessary. He really didn’t care about either, but if he were to really guess and answer honestly, he would say that the ten seconds during which the victim had stared at him with horror filled eyes and he had smiled at him (because he knew that was what the court wanted him to do, to intimidate, and he always did what the court wanted) were worse than the pain of the wound. He almost enjoyed pain in a way, it was a break from the monotony.  
And yet… there were days, wonderful, beautiful, amazing days, when he was out and he hadn’t had to kill yet, and he was flying, rooftop to rooftop, and he knew that even if he fell, (and he knew he wouldn’t fall, he belonged in the air), it wouldn’t even matter, and it was just him and and the sky. And he knew that he was faster than any talon before him, faster than the court expected or needed him to be, and so he had all the time in the world. On a normal day that wouldn’t matter to him. On a normal day he would just be a slow as they would expect him to be, because what was left of his mind was so twisted that part of him wanted to rebel while the other part yearned for their approval and would never bear to lose it by not living up to expectations. And so he was as slow as they expected him to be and appeased both parts of himself.  
But on good nights, on those amazing, once in forever nights, he used all that extra time to the very last second. He flew. He was a bird loosed free on the world after months in the darkness and he sang. He sang as he twisted and flipped and dived, contorting his body into impossible shapes, even dislocating a bone or two sometimes, because what was a little pain in return for the thrill, for the light, for the freedom. On those nights it was just him, alone with the stars, but on those nights, he, for once, did not have to feel alone, because who could be alone with the stars sparkling and laughing down at him like that?  
On those nights it was obvious that somehow the court had STILL not managed to kill off his joy.  
This, however, was not one of those nights. This was a dead night, following a dead month, following a nearly dead year. He had not gone on a mission in weeks, and while in a sense it was a relief because some small part of him still did not enjoy killing people, it was for the most part an unpleasant experience. He yearned to go out, he yearned for the court’s attention. Killing had become simply a blip at the end, the important thing, when anything managed to be important to him was the air and the flying and once in a while the singing.  
But he couldn’t say he exactly minded his life at this point. HE didn’t mind or think anything. In fact, he was really not, in a sense, conscious. If he were to be called by the court, or if anything were to happen, he would react to it appropriately, however, until then he simply existed, quiet and unthinking as the darkness. Unless the court called nothing happened.  
The darkness was his one constant, and its quiet. Sound generally was not something he indulged in. He never spoke, and it was only on those once in forever glorious good days that he sang.  
Today though, was different. He heard something, he heard a voice. And it was a young voice, a voice full of anger and fury and LIFE. It was the voice of the child, though the acrobat was quite sure that many of the words he was spewing out were not words that a child should be heard saying. It did not matter though, this was a child, and for the first time in five years, the acrobat had felt something outside of a hallucination.  
It really was’t a very impressive thing to feel. He felt only curiosity, But it was a burning, strong curiosity, mixed with anger, because what were they doing with a child?  
The acrobat decided to investigate. It was a terrible decision, but it was the first he had made in a very long time. Besides he was insane, that stretched into the way his brain worked, not just by giving him bloody visions and making him see things as they weren’t, so if his judgment was just a smidgen impaired, you had to give him a little slack.  
So the the acrobat followed the voices.  
He kept to the shadows. He was good at that. He was fairly certain that he had not been truly seen aside from when he was summoned in the four years since his mind was changed.  
That hurt, somehow. He didn’t know why, but there was some small part of him that simply wanted to be noticed, to be approved of, to be adored, not in the way that some part of him always wanted to be loved when he wanted anything, another part yearned to be in the spotlight.  
But for now, he was invisible, even to the ever vigilant talons. He was silent and dark, as the cavern he had lived in for far, far too long.  
For the first time he saw the boy. He wasn’t much to look at, really. But to the acrobat he was fascinating. The child was perhaps two years younger than he was, and a little taller. (this was no surprise. The serum that made him talon and the fact that he tended not to eat, had combined to stunt his growth, and he was never tall to begin with) The child was thin. Thinner even than the acrobat. He was far too thin to be normal. He was dirty too, and his clothes were torn and did not fit him well at all, they were far to cool for this weather. The talon felt the cold more keenly than a normal child would, but he knew that it was far too cold for a boy as small as the boy was to be out in those clothes. Somehow the boy’s presence, here in his empty place, seemed to let loose his frozen emotions, and he, who had killed five-year-olds with hardly a second thought now felt fury well within him to think that an eleven year old had to live and starve in the cold.  
But that was not the worst of it. Not by far.  
“Whatcha gonna do with me,” the boy demanded to know, with torrents of anger that the acrobat felt quite sure he would never be able to match.  
 “That is quite a pertinent question.” A voice whispered. It was the voice of an owl. (Not a real owl, but the voice of a court owl. Still for some reason the picture of a large, wise-looking, humanoid-ish owl popped up in the acrobat’s mind. He had the indescribable urge to laugh, which he had not done since he became a talon, aside from once in a long while on those few and far between wonderful days. Since when did his hallucinations have a sense of humor?) Anyway, the part of him that was still reasonably sane had the sense to freeze at that voice. The voice of one of the ones that had done this to him. Not that he cared about that so very much. It was simply that he had a real true, emotion? curiosity was not an emotion exactly, more just a sort of feeling. Any way, he had it, and it was actual, not weak and vague like the joy that he sometimes felt and made him fly and sing the songs that must come from before. If he were normal, the curiosity would probably seemed casual, yet now, in his starved mental state, it was over-powering.  
And somehow he had come to almost care about the boy. He had not truly cared about anything for a long time. What was there to care about. Certainly not himself. He would gladly die if he could, no he would not mind dying. He did not want to especially. He had not wanted anything since the changed him. But now he did want something. He wanted to know more about the strange child that had invaded his place of solitude and darkness, and filled it with, almost a sort of light. Not a bright light by any means, or a pure one, not at all like the stars or the moon. In fact, the best way he could describe the boy’s light was dirty. And yet it was light all the same, a fire, burning with anger and half-pretended, but never yielding strength, altogether unquenchable. The acrobat was drawn to it as surely as a moth to a flame. And so he listened, and kept himself hidden.  
“Why have you brought this child here?” the owl was saying. The talons who had taken the boy seemed to hesitate. It was slight, but it was definitely there. After all, most talons did not need to lose themselves completely. for them reconditioning was more like persuasion. Strong, lasting and forced persuasion that dug into the depths of their psyches and made their every thought compliant with itself after feelings such as love and pity had been completely annihilated, yet still persuasion. They did not need to be repaid into beings without emotion. Most of them them had an almost healthy sense of fear. The acrobat had no fear at all, which was surprising given all the torment they had put his mind through, but while he experienced most emotions at least a very small level once in a while, he never felt afraid. The only time he felt that emotion was once in a while in the hallucinations of the familiar people.  
Right now the two talons were frightened and unsure.  
“We found him,” the older one said. They all looked the same age aside from the acrobat, but the acrobat knew which one was older. It was a matter of seniority.  
“And what are you doing with it?”  
“We are bringing it to the court.” they were hesitant, as though not at all sure what to do with it.  
“And is this a matter of importance, important enough for the court?”  
He could see them shifting, just slightly, nervous. And then he realized. They had no idea how to make decisions themselves, they merely did as they were told. They were very good talons, but that did not in any way grant them good decision making skills. Even for a choice as trivial as what to do with a boy who had come in to the extremely secret maze of the court of owls, they had no idea how to act, even though it was obvious that the simple and correct answer was to kill him. The acrobat had an unexpected urge to smirk. How exactly had he gotten to the point that smirking was something he did? He was dead a few minutes ago. But the boy being here had somehow shattered something in his already shattered brain.  
The boy growled.  
“I’m right here, ya know. You can stop discussing me like I’m not.”  
The owl and talons, (the acrobat believed their names were Harrison and Orleans) paid no mind to this. The boy didn’t seem to be at all surprised at that, just kept his glare and squirmed.  
It was obvious what he was doing. He was trying to stay tough, to act like he was not scared. He seemed to have a thing against being scared. Of course it was painfully obvious that the boy was terrified. He was actually quite… adorable. Yes, that was what he was. Innocent in such a rough violent way. He knew what would happen now. They were in the presence of someone with actual authority now, someone capable of actually making decisions. The acrobat knew what would happen now: the Owl would yell at the talons for a bit for being unable to make a simple decision, (which has really unfair since he, along with the rest of the court, were what made him that way to begin with. But whatever.) And then he would kill the boy, no one, after all, could see what he had seen, figure out what was happening and then be allowed to go free. Besides, it wasn’t as if the boy would matter. He could kill him easily himself, or at least he should be able to. Killing was nothing to them.  
That did not change the fact that this boy was about to die, and for the first time in as long as the acrobat could accurately remember, he did not want to see that happen, could not bare to, he did not want to see the flame go out.  
But he would have to. He was torn between averting his eyes when it happened or giving the boy the respect of watching his pain and sharing it a little. He had not made a decision since he became a talon, and doing so now was almost impossible. Especially since it was all in terms of emotions. He had no training for this, and for so long training was all he had known.  
Yet the owl did not kill the boy. The acrobat thought he had, he saw the boy torn into small pieces and rotting as flies swarmed across him and he nearly was sick, but then he realized that there was no way that flies could get here and that was just his broken mind showing him things as they weren’t.  
Instead the Owl for some reason seemed to think it was a good idea to present the boy to the court anyway.  
Why? The acrobat could not understand it. Yet the he took the boy with him toward the court. The acrobat followed.  
The boy was cursing again. And really, it almost shocked the acrobat, the things he said. Funny that he could kill thousands without batting an eye, yet curses still threw him. He did not understand the words at all. There were a great manny words that the talon did not understand, and many more that he did that no one else seemed to. He had figured out a while that different words belonged to different languages and that the language, or rather languages he used in his head was different from the one the court and talons sued. It had been hard at first, knot knowing how to understand his commands. That was back when he didn’t want to follow them anyway, so it really did not make too much difference, yet it was odd all the same. Yet now the acrobat did not need to know what the words meant. He knew from the way they were said that they were not the sort of words a small boy should be saying.  
But all that really shouldn’t matter. His mind was wandering, it often did that when it was used at all. But that was not what he wanted it to do for the moment. For the first time he actually had a use for his mind. He needed to know what was happening to the boy.  
Why did he care? He had not cared about anything in years. What was so special about this boy? The answer seemed to come out of absolutely nowhere, along with the logic he used with it. The boy was in his living place, his home if anywhere was. They were two boys with the same home, that made them brothers. The boy was the acrobat’s little brother. He accepted this idea absolutely. He knew that older brothers cared for there younger brothers, so he would care, no matter how much it hurt.  
The boy kept demanding to be told what was going on, and the acrobat had a similar sentiment. Why did the court need the boy? What was going on?  
When the boy reached the court the great owl was spoken to in a whisper that even the acrobat could not quite hear. Then the court was assembled.  
Over the course of the next… he wasn’t quite sure how many hours. He didn’t think in those terms much since becoming talon. He watched as Owls slowly Gathered in the court room.  
The great owl stood to speak to the boy.  
“What do you know of this place?” he asked  
“That it’s super creepy,’” the boy replied, with more creative language.  
“Where do you believe you are?”  “If my memory’s right and I didn’t somehow get drugged or somethin, I’d say that I was under Gotham running from an irate batman and in the company of the court of owls from the story. Yep, I’m high alright. Not at all like how I imagined it’d be. When I find out who did this to me,” His words dissolved into curses.  
The Owl was only asking this out of formality. They were really in to formality at the court. The great owl continued.  
“While you see that the boy currently does not believe what is going on is real,” (the acrobat could tell that the boy knew perfectly well that this wasn’t all one big drug induced hallucination. He could almost see the wheels turning in the kids mind, like “wow, I’m really going to die. I can’t believe I’m actually doing. And the court is real and I just got chased by the BATMAN and wow, this is actually a pretty cool way to go, considering.)  
“It is still necessary that he never be in the position to tell anyone what has happened to him this night. While it would be quite simple and advantageous for the court to kill him, I believe we might be better off putting him to use. He is brave and highly intelligent, andI believe we could put him to good use. I believe it would be good if he became talon. We have never had two nameless talons at the same time, yet I feel that as the acrobat is without emotion, the ordinary strife between talons could be avoided…” He went on like that, the the acrobat wasn’t listening. He stood there staring, his brain not quite computing what was happening.  
His first thought, oddly enough, was “We really are brothers now.” and his heart jumped at the thought.  
His next though was a resounding and firm NO. Not that they should not be brothers, no he had invested in that idea, his soul seemed tied to it now. No, it was not their brotherhood that he would fight against, but the idea that the court would make any other child a talon. He would let no one fall as he had fallen. He would fight tooth and claw, He was NOT letting them torture and break HIS brother.  
And so for a long time he stopped. time stood still and anger welled within him, anger, but more than anger, determination. Determination because he would fight, for the first time since they had broken him. He would fight the court and he would keep his baby brother safe.  
After the court made their decision, (it took a lot of murmuring and grumbling and arguing, but in the end they agreed with the great owl as they almost always did) things moved much faster. The court disassembled and the boy was dragged away. The acrobat followed him.  
“Tell us your name,” The talon in charge of his transformation asked. The acrobat paused stock still to listen to this, because this was the very most important thing. The boy could not lose his name.  
“Jason,” the boy said.  
“Last name?” the talon asked.  
“Doesn’t matter.”  
The acrobat stared at him. How could his last name not matter to him. He had always felt somehow that his last name was very important, more important than his first. He could make up a first name for himself, if he had to, he supposed, but a last name was part of him, a legacy, a thing to be loyal to. His great great grandfather did not have the same last name as he did. He would have known if he did. He was glad that they did not share that, he thought of his last name as something precious. He wondered what could make the boy not want his. He supposed that maybe if his last name HAD been Cobb he wouldn’t have wanted it, would have wanted to forget, as much as possible, that he and Cobb were of the same blood. He wondered if something similar had happened to the boy, Jason.  
Jason. He thought the word in his head, imagining it on his tongue. He would keep it for him. He would give it back to the boy. He could not stop this part of the plan that was starting now. He did not have time to think of a way to get the boy away, yet when the transformation was complete, when the boy was talon in body, the acrobat would make sure he was never one in soul.  
Jason. He thought the name again. He did not follow them any farther. He had the name now, he really did not need more. He knew what would happen next. He did not remember his own transformation but he knew how they worked. In the meantime he would practice the name.  
The acrobat did not say words well. They felt strange on his tongue and often they did not sound even a little as they were supposed to, at least not the words in English. He did not think in that language, but in another. At first, when he first came out from the making, he had thought something was wrong with him (something other than the obvious emotional, mental damage they had put on him). He did not understand anything the talons said to him, which made it hard to take orders. Fortunately he learned languages very quickly, and soon understood all. There was obviously a time where they thought they had permanently ruined his intelligence, it was good that they learned eventually that he was not altogether stupid. They never learned though, just HOW intelligent he actually was.  
But though he had learned the English enough to listen, he had not spoken it, he had never spoken it. He only spoke at all when he was flying, singing to the sky. But he did that very rarely, so that sometimes it was hard for him to speak his own language. He had never, since he had become a talon, thought of his own new words and sentences to say.  
But he knew now he would need to speak sooner or later. He would need to talk to the boy, to Jason. He was the keeper of his name, and he would need to give it to him, he would need to present it to him, pronouncing it clearly, perfectly, just as he had. And so, in the darkness, he practiced. He said the the name in a whisper, high in a hidden alcove he had found, he could not remember when. No one would find him.  
He whispered the name practicing it on his tongue, and he tried to plan. It was hard. The halucinations kept coming and they were very distracting. and it was extremely hard to keep his mind on track. He would jump to outrageous conclusions and it would only be, sometimes over an hour later that he would realize how his mind had jumped. His brain did that sometimes. It had glitches.  
Even without the hallucinations and glitches it would have been hard. He had not had to think about anything in a very long time.  
Yet… he thought he could outsmart the talons and the court. Maybe that was his crazy talking, or his even crazier urge to PROTECT that would not be denied… yet. He thought he could do it. Because he DID have that urge. Because he knew he would not stop until he did. And he did have the beginnings of a plan. He had over a month and a half to perfect it.  
He had one thing in his favor. All this was unexpected. He would catch the court unawares, and that was not something that happened often. In fact, he was pretty sure that that had not happened in hundreds of years. If he did this now it would take them off balance, and he wasn’t sure that they knew how to act under those circumstances anymore.  
There were a few reasons why he would be able to catch them off guard, a few things in his favor.  
First of all, they were not watching him. They had given that up long ago. They trusted him. Secondly, they did not expect him to do anything like this. They had a few incorrect assumptions about him. They believed him to be completely without emotion. He had been, when they had first taken him out, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say he tried to be. Because at that point emotions HURT, and the good ones, love, joy, hope, they hurt the most, because they seemed the most empty. Even after he had been without them, for about ninety percent of the time. But they had made a fatal mistake (not that he knew that) they had taken their little bird and let him out to fly. True, at the end of each flight he had had to kill, but still, they had allowed a Flying Grayson to fly, and a Grayson flying will always feel a little joy. You cannot take that away from him. And so, once in a while, their perfect little Talon had felt joy, and joy is such a strange bright emotion, it is tied, intrinsically with things like love and hope. Love because, for him though he did not remember it, the joy of flying had been connected, always, to the love he felt for his parents. And also, because it is always true, whether flying Grayson or not, that whatever makes a person joyful they must love, it is love of the thing that makes joy, and the joy it brings causes you to love a thing all the more. It is connected to hope because in a strange way, joy is a kind of hope. When you can have joy, even in the darkness, when there is something that brings joy, it is also a light that lets you see forward, and when you have joy, you can look on and think maybe, maybe, there will also be joy in the future. Joy gives you a reason to hold on to the maybe of things someday changing, because it means that that change will be worthwhile. When he was flying, the acrobat could hope that maybe, someday, he could fly forever. It was not a reasonable hope, it was not a hope of escape, and it was not one he ever came close to putting into words, yet it was hope all the same. And what hope, after all, is reasonable? What hope is practical? And who, really, puts all the depths of their hope into words?  
The acrobat’s joy was ecstatic, even though he only felt it once in a very long while and for the briefest of moments. His love was steadfast, though it was deep down in his soul and without an object, and therefore deep asleep, to any observer, dead, but it was there. And his hope was shining and bright, and radiant, even if he could not see it. The court knew none of this. They only knew that they had broken him. They did not understand broken things’ ability to heal, they did not understand the strength of a flying Grayson.  
And now, now all had fallen into place. Now the darkness was lifting. Until now the only one of these feelings that the acrobat had truly felt was joy, because that was the only one that had, connected to it, an action. That joy had reinstated the other emotions but they had stayed dormant without an object. Now they had the boy, Jason.  
And the court had no idea.  
There was a great deal they did not know. They saw what the acrobat showed them, what the acrobat was capable of in his strange, half-dead state, caring only to impress them, yet some part of him always hating them for their taking everything that was good, everything that was him, everything he felt and turning him into a strange sort of killing machine. He was always obedient, completely and utterly so. He excelled, to the point where he was better than any talon in the history of the Court, but only just, he did not show them how great he truly was, he did not allow them to see how he could fly. He basked in their approval, and tried not to think, because he had little reason to and he did not wish to, thinking brought him only to darkness. But they did not know this. They thought that he was now simply incapable of thought. They had thought him rather unremarkable mentally in the first place, because he had been in such a state of shock after his parents, and because he was never one to show what he was truly capable of in that arena. He was homeschooled and did fairly well, but sitting still long enough to learn something was all but impossible for him back then and so his scholarly records were were less than stellar. More than anything the acrobat did not want to disappoint the court, he wanted to be their perfect talon, so he hid how his mind was a bit broken from them. Thus they thought he was fine in that regard, they did not know that their conditioning had any unwanted side effects, yet it also meant that the talon, though he did not consciously remember most of his previous efforts, now was quite adept at knowing how to hide things from them.  
The talon did not know all this, but he did know that the Court would underestimate him, would not estimate him in the first place, would never add him in to their calculations as a threat. So he knew that his plan could, perhaps succeed, all it took was a little deception of the court, which was something he did all the time, if not nearly to this scale. He was willing to plan this time, and he would go over his plan over and over, analyzing it for any logical discrepancies, anticipating every one of the court’s moves, hallucinations and weird random mind jumps or no hallucinations and weird random mind jumps.  
The Plan was coming along already, and he still had a long time to perfect it. When the time was right it WOULD be perfected, because NO ONE was going to break someone else the way they had broken him, and NO ONE was ever going to hurt HIS baby brother. Not while he was there to stop it. 

The talon, The Acrobat stared at the boy, Jason, he could say the name perfectly now, ready for it to be returned. The boy looked so alone now, frozen before him on the floor. He looked so BROKEN already. His face that had been full of life was dead and pale now, and so cold, so very, very cold. But he was not broken, not really. His body had been prodded and poked and CHANGED, the life blood taken from him and replaced with poison, poison worse than the poison that killed, this was poison that kept you alive, forever, whether you wanted to live or not. This was the poison of pain, and it changed something beautiful into something FAKE. A weapon.  
Yet he was not really broken, not yet. Jason was still Jason. His memories were gone, it was true, yet he was still him, he had not lost his sanity, his ability to feel, his ability, the greatest there was, that gift and curse that all mankind has a RIGHT to whether they abuse it or choose rightly, the ability to disobey.  
The plan had worked so far. No one had seen him, not yet. The blood and bone he had left behind were right. He had taken things from his last killing, and he had taken others from his own body, and, as much as it had hurt, it was necessary, he had taken things from the boy himself. Nothing that would not easily grow back, but enough. And he had made sure that his was the only DNA that was not corrupted. He had had to think a long while to figure out that trick, and it had taken a long time to mutilate the bloody conglomeration he had created, yet it was worth it. The boy would be concluded dead. Just another one of his murders.  
He picked the boy up. He was far, far too light. Perhaps lighter than the Talon was himself. That hurt how light he was.  
But of course he was not so very light. He was at least nearly as heavy as the acrobat, and though the acrobat had plenty of strength to lift his own weight, it was not the easiest thing in the world, and it made it harder for him to be silent enough to go unnoticed through the halls. And impossible to move in the ways he had needed to.  
Thus his planning had to be perfect. He believed it had been. But how could he know for sure? He was afraid. Fear was so strange to him, and it almost forced him into inaction with its newness, yet he forced himself to move on.  
The hallucinations were nearly constant now. He kept seeing, over and over again, the pretend Jason he had left mutilated in front of the freezing chambers. Only now it was not pretend, Jason the dead was real and he had killed him.  
Or else he saw him killed a thousand other ways. Like he suddenly dropped the boy right here, right now and tore him to pieces. Sometimes he ate him. Or else it was other talons who came out at him in droves and killed Jason. Sometimes the acrobat just stood there not doing anything, obeying orders, because that was what he did, that was what he had always done. Or else he was there and wanting, desperately to save his little brother, but completely unable, or else he was there watching them do it, only he was laughing. Which was utterly ridiculous, because he did not know how to laugh at all. He was not even sure if he had heard the sound in the last five years he had been away from real life.  
And added to that, he kept seeing things, hunks of rock, really, were the only things around, transform into Talons or Owls before his very eyes, and he was always so certain that that was what they were. But he MADE himself push past these things, when the not talons did not respond to seeing him standing there with the new talon in his arms. He TOLD himself they were not real and made himself walk past.  
And of course his brain was deciding to be difficult in every way possible. He kept being sure that there were flaws in his plan. things like:  “Jason’s name starts with a JAY like the bird. That completely ruins every part of this plan” or thoughts even more ridiculous and senseless would bombard his mind and it would take long, precious moments to convince himself that this was not a logical breakthrough but only his low grade (Though he might, at this point, want to reevaluate his mental state too, low grade didn’t seem to cut it anymore) insanity speaking. He finally convinced himself to keep going, come what may, even if his plan was doomed to failure. After all, what did either of them have to lose?  
So he carried the boy, Jason, through the winding tunnels as quickly and silently as he could, hoping that no one would hear, that no one would find him. He walked on and on until, finally, he made it.  
It was nighttime. He wasn’t sure why he had chosen to come out at night. There was, in fact, a time in the daytime that would've suited his plan better, a time when he was even less likely to be seen. But he had not taken it.  
He was, in all honesty, afraid to. When he could want anything, when he gathered up the will and imagination to wonder, he had always wanted to go up and see the sun, always wondered what it was like in the daylight. But the darkness was safe, he belonged in the darkness, he was not safe in the sun, in the light he could be seen, and he was too ugly a thing for that.   There was, actually, al logical reason to come out at night as well. He was less likely to be seen at night, and a deathly pale boy who looked no more than ten and carrying another who looked about the same age and was equally pale was not an ordinary occurrence, even in Gotham.  
Regardless, the acrobat carried Jason out into the hazy starlight. It was raining, but then it was almost always raining in Gotham. He took the younger boy through the streets, still managing to walk like a shadow (though now a slightly more conspicuous one) along the dark streets with the boy in his arms.  
He came to his destination, an empty ally, a really empty one. The crime of Gotham was like a pool, a murky, dirty pool whose waters were always moving, changing. It had eddies and stagnant spots and forgotten places where the water almost ran clean because all the dirt ran elsewhere. This ally was one of those clean places, and for the meantime, for this very short time until the tides shifted just the tiniest bit and someone claimed it, it was, quite possibly, one of the safest places in Gotham.  
So, it was only his irrational fears that nagged at him (No, they screamed, giving him all kinds of ridiculous reasons for him to be afraid “but walls are painted dark gray, that means that he’ll be hurt for sure” It’s only dirt, he tried to remind himself, everywhere in gotham is like this, and really how is that relevant? and when he did manage to subdue that doubt another popped up in its place) when he left the boy alone in the ally (with many a backwards glanced that showed him things as they weren’t, and he really should have been smarter than to do that) and left in search of food. Because he knew that the boy would be VERY hungry when he reentered the land of the living. (Sort of reentered. He would never be quite human again. The acrobat had failed in that respect. He tried not to think about that too much.) He crept silently into houses all but baring their cupboards and fridges. It did not even occur to him that the inhabitants of the houses might need the food. This area of Gothom was richer than many, but it was still a fact that every penny counted here. But he was a killer. A little petty thievery was nothing to him.  
Still, when he was about to take the obviously well-loved blanket from the bed of a little girl, he paused, and went instead to the cabinet where he found the extras, taking one of those instead. The house was empty. He only went into empty houses, because he knew that if he was found by anyone, seen by anyone, he would kill them. He did not want to kill at the moment.  
He walked back to the ally where the boy lay. He was still not awake. The acrobat took the blanket and draped it over the younger boy, hoping it would keep him at least a little warmer. The concept of blankets was based on the idea that humans have body heat, which then could be conserved by the insulation of the blanket. But, Talons weren’t like normal people they didn’t keep themselves warm as much, their own body heat less than half of what a normal person could generate. They also were made so that the drop in temperature couldn’t kill them (hence the viability of freezing them) But that did not make it comfortable or good for them, when it was too cold they could not heal at all.  
The acrobat sat still next to the boy. He did not like to sit still. Usually when he did he fell into a kind of stupor, in which he felt nothing and thought nothing and though he was, in a sense, aware of his surroundings so that he could react to them if necessary, he was really not properly conscious. Now, however, he could not seem to fall into this state (nor did he want to) he was too full of thoughts and new feelings to lose himself. This meant that he was bored. And fidgety . He did NOT like sitting still. He had absolutely nothing to do, and while that had never been a problem for him before, he had never been in a state to care about anything before. It turned out that being bored was something he did not like at all. He hated it almost as much as he hated sitting still.  
Of course, there were always the hallucinations. They came every once in a while, but they were hardly pleasant entertainment. He sighed. It sounded weird in the darkness, because he had never made that sound before to his knowledge and he had never heard it in someone else. (An exasperated sigh was not exactly the reaction most people had to seeing an assassin from a nursery rhyme attacking them.) He simply couldn't stay still. He didn’t want to leave the boy, Jason, either. So he did what any acrobat would do. He stood on his hands. Then he stood on one hand. Then he did a couple of silent back flips. After a while he had an idea. He had never tested his limits in things that did not include killing, he wondered just how good he was at… well, he had no idea what it was he did. Acrobattting, he supposed.  
And so he began. He jumped and tumbled and twisted in mid air. It was… fun perhaps was the word that could be used for it. It was rather like those amazing times on the rooftops, only less exhilarating and less careless and more experimental, filled with the almost clinical excitement of discovery. After a while, he felt the urge to sing. He sang the songs that he somehow knew, beautiful music that seemed meant to go with the jumping and twisting. These words came to his lips easily, they seemed RIGHT and warm and beautiful. He sang and moved in time music and movement coming together to make something amazing. It was flying, he didn’t have the height for that, but it was fun.   Jason made a sound. The acrobat stopped in mid air, and had just barely had the presence of mind to fall gracefully into a crouch at the last second as the trajectory of his jump was ruined. Jason was waking up. And for the first time that the acrobat could remember, he almost panicked.  
Because, his plan had left out a teeny, tiny little detail: The acrobat had absolutely no idea how to interact with people. So he walked, silently up to the still, still form of the boy and knelt down, staring at him, wondering what he would do. Was he supposed to talk? He had no idea. If he was, what would he supposed to say?   He knew he would say the boy’s name, give it to him. That was the one important thing he could do for him. But it still seemed a bit inadequate. When the boy woke up he could  
t just blurt out his carefully prepared word “Jason” and expect the boy to understand all that that word meant. But he had no time for that. The boy was now opening his eyes.  
“Who are you?” The boy asked, his voice slurred. And now the Talon knew that he could not simply say the name because the boy would only think it was the acrobat’s.  
Then something cleared in the boy’s eyes and he skittered away from him eyes full of terror.  
This was something that the Talon was used to, and as horrible as it was, it comforted him. The acrobat did not like seeing that look in the eyes of his little brother, he wanted nothing more than to kill the one who had put it there (unfortunately that person was himself, and he couldn’t kill himself, he’d tried quite a few times, more on a whim than anything else) but it at least meant that things were familiar in this strange (if wonderful) world where he felt things, where he had a little brother to love and to hope for.  
But the Talon for once needed not to inspire fear, but to quell it. Because that, he somehow knew (though how, exactly, he had no idea) was what big brothers did. So words came unbidden to his lips, spilling out awkwardly, comfort, roughly to the effect of, “I won’t hurt you little brother, it’s alright, you’re safe, I’m here, I’d never hurt you, over and over.  
Unfortunately, they didn’t come in english. Instead the rambled and bumped out of him in about half a dozen other languages, mostly the one he used to sing with, the one he used the most in his head. His apparent insanity (he was insane, but more manageably than he appeared to be at the moment) only terrified the poor boy more.  
Seeing this, the acrobat took a deep breath and said, in English, very slowly and deliberately (and badly, he knew his grammar and pronunciation REALLY stank)  
“Me not hurt you.”  
The boy looked less than reassured. The talon had no idea what to do at this point. And he felt awkward and he had never felt like that before (Not ever, actually, not even before) He felt like he should do something. He had the strange urge to wrap his arms around his brother and sing him one of the songs, but the still slightly logical part of his brain managed to convince him that that was a very bad idea.  
So, instead, he just said, “You Jason.” Again that should have had a lot more words in it. But grammar was not something he had the time or brain power to worry about at the moment. But Jason just looked at him blankly and fearfully. So the acrobat tried again.  
“You name Jason. I … (what was the past tense of keep? Keeper? Oh, that’s it) “kept. For you. Now I give.”  
He should have used the word “it” to make it clear what he had kept. Also, he was pretty sure that “Now I give” was not a proper sentence. Oh, well. He thought he had got the message across, that was all that matters, wasn’t it? And he had said Jason perfectly. That was the important thing. The boy had his name now. No one would ever be able to take it from him again, and if they did, The Acrobat would keep it for him and give it aback again.  
For now though he stood awkwardly for a few more seconds, staring at Jason, simply glad he was there, he was alive, and he was safe. HE had not been broken, and the acrobat had done right as a big brother.  
The acrobat disappeared into the shadows. He looked back at the boy staring at where he had been like he couldn’t believe what had happened. It hurt to leave, hurt more than any of the physical wounds. But he had to. It would do no good to associate with a talon, an assassin, after all. Besides, the Acrobat had to get back to the court. Because that was all he knew, and that was all he had, and so, as much as he hated it, he was loyal. He could not get rid of that loyalty anymore than he could kill himself. He had tried. He had failed. Because he was Dick Grayson, and even when he was incapable of love he could not exist without its close second, loyalty and striving for approval. And so, the Talon left, a changed little bird, who vowed never to forget he's little brother, but who expected, and hoped, never to see him again.


End file.
